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Animated buttons in Half-Life

By Michiel 'Mike' Hakvoort

This is a short guide on how to do animated buttons in Half-Life. Most of you already know the normal on/off state of a button, but this tutorial takes you a little further and let's you create toggle-able animations. Of course I presume you are already familiar with Wally. If you're not then I suggest you first dig up a tutorial which explains to you the basics of Wally.

The whole process is quite simple and only a minor change to what we are familiar with. Normally a button would exist out of two textures of the same dimensions. For example, let's take a button out of HL.wad: +0Button1 and +AButton1. Because both of these textures have the same name - 'Button1 - these textures co-exist. Now we see the +0 and the +A. The +0 stands for the sequence when off and the +A stands for the sequence when on.

Now when you texture a button with this texture it will show the +0 texture when on and the +A texture when off. So far the example is of a two texture button. Now we can move on to a button which uses four textures, two for the on state and two for the off state. Say the we will call the button 'Button5', then the textures will have to be named like this:+0Button5+1Button5+AButton5+BButton5

Now the button will animate between the +numeric when off (untriggered state) and +alphabetic when on (triggered state). It's as easy as that and you can even use more textures! Of course you can use this way of texturing for many things, like switchable TVs or more advanced computer screens. I hope you'll have fun with it, Cheers!